Amazon's 8-Part Sci-Fi Series Is Stranger Things With Time Travel & Robots

©Amazon / Courtesy Everett Collection Published Jul 29, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. Sign in to your ScreenRant account A couple of years ago, it seemed as though Prime Video had cornered the market on fascinating, original, thought-provoking sci-fi shows. But it also cornered the market on cancelling great sci-fi shows just when they were getting good. The Peripheral was a mind-bending dual-timeline cyberpunk saga that got canned after one season. Outer Range was a curious blend of gritty neo-western and gonzo sci-fi that got canned after two seasons. Eventually, the sci-fi streaming crown went to Apple TV. Apple has been turning seminal sci-fi novels like Neuromancer and Foundation into big-budget streaming shows. It’s exploring an alternate version of the Space Race in For All Mankind, an eerily benevolent alien invasion in Pluribus, and a dystopian work-life balance in Severance. Apple gives its sci-fi shows room to breathe, and room to grow, and it’s resulted in a steady stream of masterpieces. Amazon could’ve held that title for itself, but it didn’t take enough chances on its best sci-fi shows. Fallout has been a smashing success, but for every Fallout, there are a dozen shows like Paper Girls that Amazon gutted before they got a fair shake. Paper Girls Was More Than Just A Stranger Things Ripoff In the wake of Stranger Things’ unprecedented success, Hollywood started desperately trying to replicate its success. They remade all the classic Stephen King stories that inspired the Netflix show, from It to Firestarter, with varying degrees of success. They put Finn Wolfhard in a real Ghostbusters uniform — not just his Halloween costume from Stranger Things — and rebooted the Ghostbusters franchise as a coming-of-age drama about plucky kids encountering supernatural terrors in their small town. Prime Video tried to make its own Stranger Things with a TV adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’s comic book Paper Girls. Although the comic debuted in 2015, a year before Stranger Things premiered, the similarities are undeniable: a group of kids in the ‘80s, riding their bikes, encountering paranormal peril. But once you get into it, it quickly becomes its own thing. Paper Girls begins in 1988, with a band of misfits delivering newspapers the morning after Halloween, but it starts jumping all over the timeline after the kids get swept up in a war between time-traveling factions. They end up encountering their own future selves, and creator Stephany Folsom wrings all the juicy dramatic potential out of those encounters. Paper Girls is much more than a Stranger Things ripoff. It has time travel and Voltron-style battlebots. Paper Girls Deserved More Than One Season Back in 2022, Amazon sent Paper Girls out to die. The show barely had a production budget — some of the CGI looks worse than The Walking Dead’s VFX from a decade earlier — and Prime barely bothered to market it to its target audience. Then, when no one tuned in to watch a show they didn’t even know existed, Amazon had a convenient excuse to cancel it after one season. I was one of the few people who watched Paper Girls when it came out, and I wasn’t made aware of it through a trailer or a poster or one of the other ways you’re supposed to hear about a new TV show; I heard about it from a glowing recommendation by Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin on the Fatman Beyond podcast. A company with Amazon’s resources shouldn’t have to rely on podcasters to tell their subscribers when they’ve got a great new show out. Paper Girls deserved so much more than a hasty one-and-done hatchet job. The visual effects didn’t look great, but the cast’s chemistry was electric, and they were all rich, interesting, deeply human characters in their own way, with far more potential than eight episodes could live up to. Paper Girls Release Date 2022 - 2022-00-00 Network Amazon Prime Video Showrunner Stephany Folsom Directors Brian K. Vaughan Cast